Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> writes In the past couple years Google and Amazon return search results to not just the title or author, but the text in the book if it has been OCR'ed or was originally electronic. Obviously Google knows a lot about efficient free-text searching but other folks know it too. In the past 15 or 20 or maybe even 30 or 40 years in the right circles (I do not hang around in database circles! But I was using Rdb a while back) the catalog would be loaded straight to an indexed database with several keys arranged for easy alphabetical sorting. The indexed database might even be smart enough to allow free-text or associative searching through some clever trickery. Even if there wasn't an index on the field we wanted to sort on there's probably the SQL "ORDER BY (whatever)" keyword. I will admit that databases can do some spectacularly slow things if you build your indices wrong, and even the most expensive version of Oracle can suddenly become much slower than an Apple II running a linear search on a cassette-tape file in the hands of the clueless. In the past 10 years or so, I'd just say (in Perl) "sort keys %hash". Surprisingly until fairly recently this could, worst case, be a quadratic sort but they recently put some tricks in (preshuffling) so this will basically never happen. If I was interviewing a recent CS graduate I would expect him to not address the problem of a card catalog index by talking only about sorting, I'd expect him to know some of the newer technologies - databases with keys; maybe even knowing about hashes if I ask about how a database implements an index; possibly knowing about the indexing technolgies allowing free-text searches. If he started talking about bubble vs shell sort I would go "OK, you got the points for knowing about sorting, now teach me about this new stuff" about 10 words in. If I wanted to know what he knew about how algorithmic complexity I'd ask him about bogosort which probably they didn't teach him about in school, but would give him a leg up if he had been reading or maybe even contributing to the Jargon File for the past few decades. If a candidate agreed with me that buying Oracle got the governor of California fired, I'd hire him on the spot. If I had a new hire and I saw him writing any sort algorithm, I'd teach him how to do it by using one already built into the system. Tim.